Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

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Wain, John (December 1, 1962). "The Great Burroughs Affair". The New Republic . Retrieved 2 July 2023.

I have become such a quiet and banal, ordinary househusband. Still trying to WAKE UP... as slowly as humanly possible! Italian comics artist Gianluca Lerici, better known under his artistic pseudonym Professor Bad Trip, adapted the novel into a graphic novel titled Il Pasto Nudo (1992), published by Shake Edizioni. [60] Audio versions [ edit ] I celebrated New Year by gorging my literary appetite on the short stories of Franz Kafka. I started Joyce’s Ulysses (agenbite of inwit...) after reading his autobiography of Stephen Daedalus, whom I mistook for myself. The vignettes (which Burroughs called "routines") are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs: heroin, morphine and, while in Tangier, majoun (a strong hashish confection), as well as a German opioid with the brand name Eukodol ( oxycodone), of which he wrote frequently. [2] Naked Lunch is considered a key influence on the cyberpunk genre. [44] William Gibson has cited it as one of the novels that most influenced his own writing. [45] Obscenity and censorship [ edit ]Boyd, Susan C. (2009). Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. University of Toronto Press. p. 210. ISBN 978-1442610170. I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..." Burroughs moved to the Tangier International Zone in 1954, shortly after the publication of his first novel Junkie. He was attracted by its reputation as a place with few restrictions on drug use or homosexuality, as portrayed in the works of Paul Bowles, and declared his intention to "steep myself in vice". [11] Bowles himself briefly appears in Naked Lunch under the name Andrew Keif. [12]

I'm heterosexual and didn't like the pornographic gay imagery sprinkled between the drug stuff. I can handle this kind of content if it functions correctly in a work, Hubert Selby jr. comes to mind. Scholarly research has also suggested Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863 as Burroughs' inspiration for the title. [ citation needed] Political context [ edit ] The beat generation has been recast in recent years as a wandering band of literary minstrels, but their achievements are inseparable from death and derangement, which stalked the leading members ("I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness ...") Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs had all seen the insides of prisons and mental hospitals by the age of 30. In 1951, while living in Mexico City, where he had gone to avoid a drugs charge, Burroughs shot his wife Joan in the head during a game of William Tell. After two weeks in custody, with the help of bribes paid out of Adding Machine profits, he was released, whereupon he resumed the life of a fugitive addict, first returning to New York, then travelling to Central America in search of hallucinogenic vegetable drugs, before settling in Tangier, Morocco. The Ugly Spirit moved in, too. For a time his regular companion was a teenage boy called Kiki. When Burroughs left Tangier temporarily in 1957, Kiki took up with a Cuban singer, who killed him after catching him in bed with a woman. Burroughs gave the news three sentences near the end of a letter to Ginsberg, which dealt mainly with the organisation of Naked Lunch. Forever Amber was one of the best-selling novels of the 1940s, and the fact that it was banned in fourteen states probably has something to do with it. The first of all the states to ban the book was Massachusetts, whose Attorney General, according to Nicole Moore’s The Censor’s Library, cited “70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, seven abortions, 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men and 49 ‘miscellaneous objectionable passages,'” including (in the words of the Customs Minister of Australia, where the book was also banned) “amorous scenes,”“impotence,”“perversion,”“suggestiveness,”“abortion,” and “coarseness.” (If only we could also ban politicians for that last one.) But Winsor herself was nonplussed. “I wrote only two sexy passages,” she said, “and my publishers took both of them out. . . They put ellipses instead. In those days, you could solve everything with an ellipse.”

Time and space shift again to a nonspecific location known as "the Interzone." Hassan and a "notorious liquefactionist" are hosting a violent orgy. A character named AJ is introduced as he crashes the orgy while imitating a pirate and indiscriminately decapitating people. An infuriated Hassan tells AJ to never return. The reader then learns about the multiple political castes in the Interzone, and how their frequent clashing has resulted in a dystopian nightmare. Murray, Karen (22 November 1992). " 'Lunch' eats up 8 Canadian Genies". Variety . Retrieved 26 August 2016.

Harris, Oliver (2003). William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-2484-9. The biographer of Naked Lunch should begin from the premise that it is an epistolary novel by a writer from a distinguished American family (the author's grandfather invented the Burroughs Adding Machine) who led a life of leisure, foreign travel and romance while living on a private income. The leisure took the form of paralysing drug addiction - Burroughs once said he could stare at the end of his shoe for eight hours on end - while the travel was motivated by evasion of the law, and the romance was mostly paid-for sex with "boys" in exotic locations.After the description of the four parties of Interzone, we are told more stories about AJ. After briefly describing Interzone, the novel breaks into sub-stories and heavily cut-up influenced passages. Introduction to Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Novia Express; episodes from Novia Express Paula Horn cover 1962 Lodge, David (1971). "Objections to William Burroughs". The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays in Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. pp.161–171. Lacayo, Richard (8 January 2010). "All-TIME 100 Novels". Time . Retrieved 15 November 2016– via entertainment.time.com. The novel has been described as "an essentially nihilistic work" [22] and "consistently hostile, contemptuous, forcefully hateful [...] without joy." [23] Robin Lydenberg suggests that the novel advocates "a violent rejection and undermining of the entire dual system of morality." [24]

Were there even true characters in this book? Evil things happen within and I found it to be an unrealistic fantasy. I read to see what crazy or disgusting thing would happen next. So here goes. I will read Naked Lunch from cover to cover, and finally figure out how I feel about it. Oh, and homosexuality - to which I have similarly remained a green stranger - and for which fact Burroughs was forced to wage a battle all the way to the US Supreme Court.a b c d Sterritt, David (2013). The Beats: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. pp.60–61. ISBN 978-0-19-979677-9. In his review for The Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer". [27] Jonathan Rosenbaum in his review for the Chicago Reader wrote, "David Cronenberg's highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing – even the film about writing". [28]